Making Milton

I’ve been working with a school in Coventry to help them develop activities for their Year 8 Flexible Learning Day focusing on science and creative writing.

As a result of this I’ve been commissioned to design a game to teach and reinforce concepts and vocabulary relating to pathogens: how they spread and how we can protect ourselves against the nasty ones.

I’ve had the school’s permission to release the game’s rules under a creative commons license, and the basic description and mechanics are now up on the Ludocity website: http://ludocity.org/wiki/Milton.

I’m currently working on designing the cards that will be used in the game and making sure they also double up as instructional prompts for the players – expect that ruleset to develop! In the meantime, I’m also soliciting feedback in advance of the game’s first plays on April 30th.

Surpass the Parcel

Surpass the Parcel is a game designed by Kevan Davies and Holly Gramazio. It’s released under an Attribution-Noncommercial Creative Commons licence and you can read the basic rule set (and others) on the rather marvellous Ludocity website.

We ran a variant of Surpass the Parcel as part of the first BARG meet-up so this post is a summary of what we did in order that I can link back to it from the discussion section on the Ludocity wiki. If you’re not familiar with the game, you should probably read the Ludocity entry first or what follows won’t make much sense!

The aim of the first BARG gathering was to find out a bit about why people where there and what aspirations and interests they had game-wise. In order to enliven this data-gathering process and to get people mingling a bit we moved some of the questions we might have asked in a standing-up-and-talking-at-people bit into the game of Surpass the Parcel.

Here are the criteria we used for the different layers of the parcel:

1. Find someone taller than you.
2. Challenge someone to Rock, Paper, Scissors. If they win, they get the parcel. If you win, they get the parcel but you can write your name in the box first.
3. Find someone who will recommend a good game to you.
4. Find someone with longer hair than you.
5. Find someone who will give you a definition of what an Alternate Reality Game is. [Tongue in cheek! I was hoping for some blatantly made-up nonsense definitions, but I don’t think that happened in the end.]
6. Find someone who has an idea for a game they would like to make.
7. Challenge someone to a staring contest. If they win, they get the parcel. If you win, they get the parcel but you can write your name in the box first.
8. Find someone who’s up for playing a game in the city centre
9. Find someone who’d be prepared to spend a few minutes talking about something at a later BARG meet
10. Find somebody with more points than you. [This could probably do with expanding on so that the person left holding the parcel at the end realises it’s the last layer and they shouldn’t open it unless they’ve go the highest score of the evening.]

The parcel itself was wrapped in (wallpaper) lining paper with the main prize being a stunningly pink set of fluffy dice and each layer having a small toy (dinosaur, marbles, little painting set, etc). Total cost: well under a fiver, with most of it going to local charity shops. Many of the gifts got incorporated into the play taking place throughout the evening. Which was nice.

The game calls for a Loud Noise to signal when each layer is to be unwrapped. There were only two of us hosting the evening and our main priority was to talk to as many people as possible, so we automated the Loud Noise Making.

Before the event I solicited requests for people to send me an mp3 file of themselves saying “BARG”. This resulted in a deliciously piratey “BAAAARRRG” from Laura E. Hall. I added some pot-clanging noises on the front end to make sure it stood out from pub chatting noises and then used Audacity to quickly make a series of tracks consisting of the Loud Noise followed by 10-15 minutes of silence.
We used a mp3 player hooked up to the venue’s rather large sound system. (Do a sound check first to make sure it all works!)

Here’s some video of the Loud Noise caught in action:

Surpass the parcel from nikkipugh on Vimeo.

And here’s the Loud Noise by itself:

[audio:http://npugh.co.uk/media/SurBARG_the_parcel_single.mp3]

Using a series of tracks instead of one continuous one meant that we could either let them run at the original pace, or easily fast-forward some of the silence to speed things along.

We were running short of time in the second half of the evening (having paused the game for a talky bit in the middle) so we made use of the fast-forwarding option bringing each round down to about 4-5 minutes. This had the side-effect of emphasising to people that there was a limited amount of time, changing the dynamics quite a lot! Up until then, the points list had lots of names with one or two points each, but now people started to realise that they could actively try and be passed-to.

It’s useful to have a pen to pass around with the parcel and, if you’re using the layers to gather information as we did, it’s a good idea to have a system in place to make sure the used layers with everyone’s names on don’t get thrown away at the end of the event!